OK Old Sailor, here's some evidence. Me.
With Hunters' stock grounding system our mast was grounded to the iron keel. The base plate was connected with #8 wire to the keel. In many electrical storms in the tropics, we were never hit. One time we were dingying back to our boat with friends when a massive storm blasted the fish out of the water in the anchorage. No one got hit. Why we survived in that rubber boat, I've yet to understand. Aboard a sailboat the crew is safe under the 'Cone of Protection' that extends out around the mast. Stay in that cone and you won't be hit. Correct me if I'm wrong here gang, but no one on a sailboat has ever been hit by lightening. Many power boaters die each year from lightening. Anyway, later during a haul-out in Costa Rica I asked a friend for advice dealing with iron keel corrosion. He said to seal it up with polyurethane. Great! I did. And I installed one of those Forespar lightening ground rods. The kind with the funny wires sticking out of it seen in the picture. Off I went for the Panama Canal. We just got out of the anchorage when a rain squall moved in front of us on radar. I was worried about lightening but didn't hear anything. The squall was lessening. Then all of a sudden, BAM! The masthead showered debris down on the deck. The sound was louder than dynamite. All of the electronics blinked off. I'll spare the details. The point is, even with that new lightening rod, we got hit. What was happening in the natural world? Was this random? No other lightening had even gone off! But this charge came to us. Why? After months of study and over $15K of uninsured repairs, I learned the following; Sealing up the keel disabled our lightening ground. The return wave was not grounded anymore so 'St Elmo's Fire' told the charge above that was forming, to HIT ME HERE! It did! Blew out over 300 holes in the epoxy keel cover. We made it to Florida and I made repairs. One of the things I did was to bypass the keel and install a ground plate. That took care of future strikes. We haven't been hit since. The keel isn't even hooked up. The Forespar rod is still there. It is wired with a jumper to the shrouds that are wired to the ground plate. All paint is bypassed in this manor insuring good electrical grounding of the RETURN WAVE. When grounding our boats, we are grounding the return wave, NOT THE LIGHTENING BOLT. No return wave, no lightening bolt. But hey!,,I could be wrong! I only speak from months of study and experience with the real thing. If it were that easy no one would ever get hit. Right? Oh, note in the picture that the wires extending out of the ground rod are bent and funny looking. That's from the strike. They refuse to straighten.
